Frank Delegate - Vote To Help ARK Succeed - 30% Sharing

Hello Ark community, I am delegate Frank. I am a 24 years old mechanical engineering graduate from Europe, currently applying for a phd program. While I am relatively new in the crypto industry, there have been a couple of projects that attracted my attention from the first moment. The first one of them was Lisk , which I ended up supporting as a testnet delegate. The second one is Ark, so here I am.

PURPOSE

As a researcher I can understand what Ark is trying to create. Out there, there are projects building decentralized supercomputers, while others build decentralized storage units and some of them build applications or file databases. For me it would be ideal to have a way to connect them all and use them for my work in daily life. And that’s the reason why I would like to help Ark and see it meet its goal to bring blockchain a step closer to everyday people.

EXPERIENCE/SKILLS

In order to be an engineer it’s part of my job to know how to deal with problems that may arise at any given moment. That’s actually what has made me keep improving and learning new stuff. In order to get my degree I had to learn quite a few things about developing, thus I would say I have a solid background in programming languages such as C and Fortran and programming environments such as Matlab. Meanwhile, as I said before , I did support Lisk’s network as a testnet delegate, that lasted for a time span of 3 months. That’s when I got an inside view of the DPOS system and got in touch with the linux/bash environment. Since then I’ve keep learning new things and shortly got to a level to be able to successfully run a high productivity node. Right now I am maintaining a node in Ark’s testnet network.

MY PROPOSAL

I would be glad to help Ark ecosystem meet their goals, that’s why I plan to donate a part of my forged coins back to the developers. It would also be nice to participate in a coordinated move with other delegates in order to support individual’s attempts to build something useful on Ark. A proportion of the Ark has to be kept as voting power in order to have reliable delegates securing the network. The rest of them will be used either as an investment in the Ark network or to cover server’s maintenance fees. The exact amounts will stay constantly updated, always according to Ark’s token value.

An implementation mechanism as an example for the referred delegate fund:

Regarding the coordinated move I am talking about and the delegate fund others in the community have proposed, I came up with an example mechanism to make it actually work. Here is my proposal:

The first step of the process is to create two known addresses, where at the end of the week each delegate will contribute a specified amount of coins. Let’s say 5% of the forged Arks. On a monthly basis that’s a total of 32400 coins gathered from 51 delegates.

The next step is to decide which projects will be selected for the funding. Thus, at the end of every second week of the month once the funds have been added to the address, the delegates will be called to vote on a list of projects and proposals filled by interested individuals in a custom form. Each of the delegates has a voting power proportional to the amount of coins he has contributed during the last 2 weeks. If one of the projects gets voted with more than 50% it gets accepted and the delegates have to decide the percentage of the monthly funds to be dedicated to this project. This can be calculated as the average value of what each delegate thinks. The individuals have then to contact the delegates and let them know if they accept the proposal. If they deny there is no need for a replacement but a recalculation of the percentages for the other projects can be applied, the delegates will vote if they want to proceed with that.

Once every two weeks, and only before the voting for new projects takes place, the benefited individuals of the previous weeks will have to make a presentation of their actual progress and update the delegates for the usage of their funds. Then the delegates will have to vote again if they approve the funding to go on for the next 2 weeks.

Once there is a minimum percentage of the funds uncommitted due to a reject, a voting for new projects will be instantly carried. That means, once a project gets rejected and the minimum funds exist the delegates will have to vote for another project to be approved. This doesn’t force the delegates for a positive vote, it is possible that no project qualifies. Additionally, each of the rejected projects will be allowed to reapply for funding during the next voting session but only with an update for this period’s progress.

In the case of a project getting approved while there are not the minimum required funds in the addresses the delegates can either:

Vote again to reject this project

Conduct a voting to reject an existing project with at least a majority of 75% required for the project’s rejection.

Increase the available funds with an equal contribution from everyone involved.

In order to make the individuals willing to carry on with the developing some positive incentives need to be applied. The main one will be that if a project completes its 3rd month of funding the voting will be conducted once per month instead of every two weeks and the needed percentage for the new month’s approval will be reduced 1% per month until it reaches a minimum of 44% (22 out of the 51 votes). The next incentive is that once the project completes its 5th month the owners will be allowed to ask for a bigger percentage of the monthly Arks to be headed towards them. The delegates then will have to discuss and vote if they accept the new proposal and how the new funds will be collected.

Finally, to minimize the danger of a fraud the funds will be split into two varying addresses with the passphrases controlled respectively by two of the delegates. The addresses and who controls them will be randomly selected after each voting. This is to guarantee that in the unlikely scenario that one of the delegates wants to make a run with the funds he gets only the half coins of the half of the month and all the rest know who he is. As you understand the responsibility is big and even if he claims that he lost the passphrase he has to be moved out of the fund losing every voting privilege.

That’s my proposal, I would like to hear your opinion on the whole idea, the numbers behind it, the implementation and maybe any fault of the mechanism that I missed.

MY NETWORK SETUP

My current testnet setup is:

Location: New York, USA

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit

CPU: 4 Cores

Ram: 2 GB + 2 GB vSwap

Storage: 60 GB RAID 10

Bandwidth: 2TB/month

Fai2ban/SSH installed

Future mainnet node:

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit

CPU: 4 Cores

Ram: 8GB + vSwap

Storage: 96 GB SSD

Bandwidth: 4TB/month

Fai2ban/SSH installed

On the mainnet I plan to run at least 3 nodes. The first one as the main node, the second one as an instant failover backup and the third one will be used as a backup/monitor for the other two. Every node will have upgraded specs and all of them will be registered with different providers across the world in order to promote security and decentralization.

CONCLUSION

I am a motivated guy always keen on improving myself and learning new technologies. I would like to see Ark succeed and thus help it bring blockchains a step closer to daily life. Please vote for me if you agree with my proposal and find it useful for the network.

Hi Frank, good proposal!. My background is in mechanical engineering as well, so am very interested in applying blockchain technology to IoT and electromechanical devices. I look forward to continued discussion with you in the Ark community. We have a number of team members into drones and developing realtime VR applications. Another must vote for me here.